The transmission of electronic information by electronic means, i.e. by e-mail for instance, is becoming increasingly important in the current age of modern information technology. As well as reducing costs, for example because less paper is used or because of savings in postage and delivery costs, which may be extremely high especially where speed is of the essence, the main advantage of transmitting messages by electronic means is that a message can reach the recipient within a very short time of being sent.
A further advantage of electronic messaging becomes evident in cases where a message needs to be sent not just to one recipient, but to a number of recipients. Whilst such a message would once have needed to be painstakingly copied or passed on from one recipient to the next—a time-consuming process—it is now possible for the message to be copied to them by electronic means in a matter of seconds. For this purpose, e-mail programs usually have a facility for defining so-called message groups, for example for interest communities or work teams. A message group lists together those persons to whom a message or e-mail is to be sent or relayed. Once the message groups have been set up, sending a message to all members of the message group is a simple process in that the addressee for the message is the message group. The onward distribution to the individual members of the message group is handled automatically by the e-mail program or by a mail server connected to it. It is usual in companies, for example, for individuals to be assigned not only to one message group, but to several in connection with various tasks.
For the sender of a message, finding out which persons belong to a message group is a highly time-consuming or even impossible task. It is therefore also difficult to determine whether one recipient of the message to be transmitted has already received it as a member of a different message group. It is virtually impossible for the sender to determine whether one of the intended recipients has already received the message from another sender. This is particularly problematic in the case of messages that have been or are to be forwarded.
This often means that recipients of messages receive the same message from one or more persons. In addition, if the message is sent by different persons, the sender sometimes adds a comment to the message, whilst the attachments etc. contained in the message remain unchanged. Whilst the comments may be of interest to the recipient in this case, the remainder of the message does not contain any new information.
For example, a manager of a team and an employee in his team may receive news about changes and activities from a standardization body via an appropriate message distribution list. The manager, who has likewise listed all his employees in a message group, forwards the message from the standardization body to his employees via the group distribution list defined by him. However, because there is a multitude of message group distribution lists in existence, it is virtually impossible for the manager to tell that one of his employees has already received the information via a different route. As a result of the employee receiving the message more than once, the amount of data traffic in the network is unnecessarily increased as well as the productivity of the employee being reduced since the latter has to spend part of his working time on identifying and deleting duplicate messages that have been received. In addition, when deleting such a duplicate message, it is often not sufficient simply to delete the message without opening it since it is not usually possible to tell from the subject line whether or not the sender of the message has added a comment to it.